Bishop Gilbert Burnet and Latitudinarian Episcopal Opposition to the Occasional Conformity Bills, 1702-1704

Abstract

Since 1689 two factions, the Latitudinarians and the High Church party, had been fighting an occasionally vicious war for control of the Church of England. The main sources of friction between them, which were connected, were orthodoxy and the place of the Protestant Dissenters in English religious life: the High Church party accused the Latitudinarians of heterodoxy and of downplaying the doctrinal differences between Anglicans and Dissenters in order to achieve a comprehension with the Dissenters. The occasional conformity controversy arose out of this ongoing feud. Between 1702 and 1704 three bills were introduced into the English House of Commons to prevent Dissenters from taking communion in an Anglican church often enough to qualify for public office. None of these bills passed in the House of Lords. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, and the other Latitudinarian bishops, were crucial to the failure of these bills and opposed them because they represented an attack on both comprehension and toleration, which they believed together formed the traditional policy of the Church of England towards Dissenters.